Representatives are often used to market and/or provide products and services to the customers of a business. Such representatives include, for example, sales representatives, customer support representatives, etc. In some industries, such as the financial service, insurance, and real estate industries, many of the representatives are licensed by an applicable authority. Brokers, insurance agents and real estate agents are just a few examples of such representatives.
Licensed representatives are often subject to a variety of rules and regulations, which if not followed, may result in suspension or revocation of the representatives license and/or potential liability for the representative and the representative's firm. For example, in the financial service industry, brokers are typically subject to rules and regulations from a variety of regulatory agencies including, for example, the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), the Federal Reserve, the various self-regulatory organizations (“SRO”), such as the National Association of Securities Dealers (“NASD”) and the New York Stock Exchange (“NYSE”), as well as the Securities Commission in every state where the broker or his firm has customers, has an office, or solicits prospective customers.
For a variety of reasons, many businesses attempt to provide some measure of supervision over the activities of their representatives. Many financial services firms, for example, have a designated supervisor or supervisory group tasked with the responsibility of monitoring the activities of the firm's representatives. While such a supervisory function is desirable, it is often difficult to achieve in practice. To supervise the activities of even a few representatives, for example, the supervisor must often review data from several different sources such as trade tickets, customer related information such as age, customer account activity, etc., and cross-correlate the information manually to determine if the activities of the representatives are in compliance with the applicable rules or standards.
To illustrate the difficulty faced by many supervisors in financial services firms, assume the supervisor wishes to detect unwanted activities relative to older customers. In one example, assume that the supervisor merely wishes to determine if any of the accounts of older customers (e.g. over 65 years of age) have executed more than 5 transactions in any given month. If an older customer account is identified as having more than 5 transactions, the supervisor may wish to follow up with the representative and/or the customer to ensure that the customer's best interests are being met. However, to identify if any of the firm's older customers have executed more than 5 transactions in any given month, the supervisor must often flag each account of the firm that has more than 5 transactions for a given month, and then determine if any of the flagged accounts correspond to older customers (e.g. over 65 years of age). For a firm that has even a few representatives, this task can be difficult, time consuming, and tedious. Similar situations often can occur with other types of firms, such as banks, insurance firms, real estate firms, etc.
What would be desirable, therefore, is a proactive and reactive method and system for helping a firm provide a measure of supervision over the activities of its representatives without requiring a significant amount of manual data sorting and/or cross-correlation.